DOCTOR WHO Movie Being Planned by David Yates

Harry Potter director David Yates and the BBC are coming together to finally adapt the iconic sci-fi TV series Doctor Who for the big screen! I'm surprised it's taken so long for this to happen... it was only a matter of time. I'm not sure how fans of the series will take to this news, it could turn out being amazing and at the same time it could be disappointing. You are just able to tell a much larger story with a TV series.

Yates recently revealed that he was going to start developing the Doctor Who movie with Jane Tranter, BBC Worldwide's L.A.-based exec VP of programming and production. Here's what he had to say to Variety in a statement, 

We're looking at writers now. We're going to spend two to three years to get it right. It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena. The notion of the time-travelling Time Lord is such a strong one, because you can express story and drama in any dimension or time.

Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction series of all time, and it will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. The original series follows the adventures across space and time of a super-intelligent alien in human form, who battles a variety of cosmic bad guys aided by plucky human companions. 

Yates went on to explain that the film adaptation will not follow the current TV series, and plans on taking it into a different direction with a fresh approach to the material. He will basically be starting from scratch, and I actually kind of like that idea. 

Russell T. Davies and then Steven Moffat have done their own transformations, which were fantastic, but we have to put that aside and start from scratch. We want a British sensibility, but having said that, Steve Kloves wrote the Potter films and captured that British sensibility perfectly, so we are looking at American writers too.

I know there's been a couple of Doctor Who films made already, but I've never seen them. The films include Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Doctor Who: Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966), both of them starred Peter Cushing.

Doctor Who is extremely popular these days and has a large following. This new movie franchise is sure to do very well. It's got a talented director attached, and if anyone can bring it to the big screen properly, I think Yates is the man to do it.

What are your thoughts on Yates developing this adaptation, and do you like the fact he's starting from scratch?

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